Comment by falaki
3 days ago
Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it [1] to no avail. Using these terminals activists and journalists continue to upload videos of demonstrations to social media which has enabled analyses that show demonstrations are very wide spread [2] and continue to grow.
[1] https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/RRB/Pages/Starlink....
Probably the goal of the blackouts is to hinder organizing on social media, discord, whatsapp, etc, not to prevent news getting out.
They are almost completely inaccessible to the average Iranian. A friend of mine who has come a long way to fight Iranian censorship told me that they essentially don't exist.
There are ~100,000 users, about 0.1% of the population: https://www.newsweek.com/starlink-usage-iran-skyrockets-brea...
Compare that to the number of cell phone users which is very close to 100%. All estimates of the number of mobile subscribers or number of mobile phone numbers are greater than the total population.
How are there so many users, see my other comment but i will ask here as well but starlink's american company and sanctioned iran so how do the details really work?
And how do starlink recievers enter the country in the first place?
This is good that there is still a way to get censorship resistance even after all this perhaps joining it with other protocols which can work via bluetooth,wifi etc. and are more secure connecting to something like this, a secure internet access point could be developed but I don't know too much about it.
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Possibly the number of users is even larger, if people can share a terminal. Wifi 802.11s Mesh with Batman routing scales very well to huge sizes.
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They must be smuggled inside the country and the dictatorship can say anything they want and charge if they get caught so they must be very few in numbers
I don't know too much about starlink but is there a way that someone can pay for other person's usage and then build a starlink receiver or something from spare parts or like easy accesible parts from the world?
Because how would people get starlink device. I dont know the mecanism of startlink though or how it works
Starlink receivers are actually very complicated. They make use of a bunch of high-end FPGAs and a bunch of other expensive and uncommon components. See this teardown: https://youtu.be/h6MfM8EFkGg?si=m-sN6UW4nh8_HzPR.
Yes, there are NGOs and organizations that sponsor these and pay for them. Here is an example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2024/12/18/inside-...
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> is there a way that someone can pay for other person's usage and then build a starlink receiver or something from spare parts or like easy accesible parts from the world?
Starlink uses a pretty sophisticated phased array antenna, so not something you can easily build in your garage.
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I wonder how easy is it to get contraband into the country. The country's huge, and with the current govt not being the most popular or financially well off, I guess there are quite a few border officers willing to make some extra money.
Starlink receivers aren't built out of common readily available components. It's fancy RF stuff.
Those who have one surely keep that fact secret.
Where are the ground stations Iranian traffic is using?
Starlink usually lacks the bandwidth to tunnel traffic very far. In most countries the ground station is in the same country. My bet is, a neighboring country, within reach of Iranian missiles. Oman and Turkey are listed but that data is old.
But its not about censorship in the usual sense really. Its about preventing peer to peer communication. With less than a percent of iranians having access to each other either locally or via foreign internet, they cut down their ability to organise significantly. Starlink doesnt offer a solution here. Starlink doesnt matter. Every starlink person could turn up to a protest and it would still be less impactful than previous protests.
My starlink in Afghanistan downlinks in Sofia.
The problem with starlink is when the taliban turn off the intenet, if you use it to concerning (tweet, talk to news channel, post a podcast), the governemt know.
> Starlink usually lacks the bandwidth to tunnel traffic very far. In most countries the ground station is in the same country. My bet is, a neighboring country, within reach of Iranian missiles. Oman and Turkey are listed but that data is old.
You really think iran is going to bomb turkey (a nato country) over this?
No, because they arent trying to prevent all communication with the outside world, they are trying to prevent organisation within their country. Leaving 0.1% of users online is acceptable.
Now if they actually did want to censor the internet, Suicide McBombervest or a missile or something would find that ground station. They simply dont give a shit.
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yes
Isn't it possible to jam the starlink receiver?
Yes, but it is more difficult than jamming a typical radio antenna because the starlink uses a directed beam rather than a omnidirectional radio broadcast. This either requires enormous amounts of power, targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam, or getting between the satellite and the ground station by bouncing a signal off the ionosphere.
The above is for jamming directed beams in general. It is likely that starlink has a number of other jamming countermeasures.
Bouncing signals off of the ionosphere is most definitely not an option here. The bandwidth of the signals that Starlink needs in order to provide service are far wider than the range of frequencies that bounce off any layer of the ionosphere. If you could get a 10GHz signal to bounce off of the F layer, you'd have a lot of very excited amateur radio operators who would start using that instead of the moon as their reflector.
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Just to add more details.
Beamforming is essentially yet another way to achieve gain, just like one does with a directional antenna. The Starlink terminal achieves a gain of roughly 33 dB, which means it talks (and also listens) in the peak direction at power levels that are around 2000x higher than what one would achieve with isotropic antennas. 2000x sounds like a lot, but it is actually not impossible to reach. Consumer electronics sends at most a few Watts of RF power, but serious jammers of the type used by militaries can run kilowatts. If you consider the peak power used for brief moments of time then you can get as high as megawatts - the famous AWACS aircraft briefly flash half a continent at somewhere around 1 MW, with average TX power of ~single digit kilowatt.
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Possible, yes, but the Iranian government almost certainly isn't capable of doing so, much less across the entire country.
Even Russians don't seem to be able to jam Starlink on the Ukrainian battlefields.
China, maybe.
Huge idiot here with an honest question: with starlink, could a rogue actor just point a bunch of high-powered lasers at the satellites and brick them?
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Multibeam too, right?
>targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam
And good luck targeting enough Starlink satellites...
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I hear after the Ukraine war, Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming. I am confident the Iranians are not as sophisticated as the Russians in than front.
> Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming.
Musk proved quite good at blocking Ukrainian Starlink access too, supporting Russia.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66752264
The Russians are themselves heavy users of starlink.
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Yes, with the caveat that you'll need decent line of sight to it.
I've got to think it's easy to find starlink receivers--I know they use a directed beam but they must give off a bunch of lateral noise, right? Or does Starlink use the same frequency bands as other common equipment such that it would be difficult to distinguish starlink signals from others? If the government was motivated they could surely start finding these receivers, right?
Well the better your beam is directed, the less lateral noise there is.
A simple 3 element yagi has <1% of the power to the sides. It has more of the power straight behind it, but still 1% or so of the main lobe.
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From what I read, the Russians were targeting Starlink terminals based on the built-in wifi access point not the Starlink frequencies.
I read the satellite has an omnidirectional antenna?
Destroy the satellites? I mean all that have to do is screw up the trajectory of some of the satellites to cause exponential collisions...
Iran does not have that capability. But that would also be an act of war.
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Ah yes, Kessler's space shredder, something to be feared by all satellites!
It appears that we are very close to an unstoppable runaway process of collisions in space. On one hand, nice that we prevent rich guys from running away to other planets after ruining this one. On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS, it would be chaos if that were to disappear...
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> social media which has enabled analyses
Social media is such a narrow lens that I would be cautious accepting that analysis at face value.
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If you want a sober and thorough analysis then using a single source is a bad idea. This does not involve feelings, in fact, quite the opposite.
If you want my feelings, then yes, I do think it's chilling that people can satisfy themselves that a few select videos from a foreign area is enough intelligence to make a decision about war.
If you've never had the pleasure of working in a war zone after the troops have left then I think you should ponder the consequences of your analysis a little more deeply.
in 2019 internet shutdown happened just before crackdown on protests